Idle thoughts – Unstructured musings from Joel Dunn…

So, I needed a post for August…

Sorry that I have not had much to say lately. I did get away for a week at the beach in early August, and we’ve been in a whirlwind getting Jason ready to go back to Virginia Tech for the academic year. He’s moving into an appartment, so he went back early in the month and moved a bunch of stuff in, and then came back for vacation with the family. He and I had a good project, though I’ll confess it was somewhat frustrating for a while. He wanted a really hot gaming PC. So, he researched things and spent his summer earnings on an ASUS motherboard, 4 gig of memory, two SATA disks, an AMD 6000+ dual core 64 bit CPU, two 256mb video cards (for SLI) and a case for it all, new fans for the case, and a UPS. Whew. Then, he and I put it together. The MOBO wouldn’t POST at first, which was a grounding problem. ASUS tech support was really good! Then, we had to figure out how to get Windows XP 64-bit installed in a RAID 1 config on the box. The RAID drivers had to be loaded from a floppy, which was a problem, since we didn’t have a floppy. I cannibalized one out of an *old* spare machine (the drive had a date stamp of 1995!) and hooked it up. Wow, things actually worked…then he had some difficulty getting SLI to work on the video cards, but by carefully following the instructions step-by-step, it came up and I think he’s happy with the performance. I can tell you it is one fast puppy.

On top of all that, his laptop started having problems, and we were hustling trying to get it repaired for him to take back. Two system boards and one display later, I think it’s fixed ;-).